Hollywood

L.A. photographer Judy Fiskin is a former art history major whose way of seeing was shaped by years spent peering at minuscule reproductions of art. She makes very tiny black and white pictures which she mounts in austere white frames and presents in clustered bouquets. There’s great delicacy to Fiskin’s presentation and her work looks rather innocuous at a glance, but these images have a terrific cumulative power. Devoid of human life, Fiskin’s pictures tour a modern landscape of stucco apartment garages, fast food stands and vast parking lots bleached by a screaming midday sun filtered through smog.

This mini-retrospective including work from 1973 to the present would thrill cultural anthropologist Reynar Banham, focusing as it does on industrial kitsch. Fiskin describes her work as “a photographic rescue mission” and she seeks out and enshrines things that most of us tune out without a second thought--dingbat apartments, tacky flower arrangements, military architecture. (The military, says Fiskin, “creates miles of functional minimal sculpture.”)

In “Desert Photographs,” Fiskin takes as her subject neither the natural beauty of the desert nor the ever-encroaching R.V. blight, but the point where those two things intersect; we see once beautiful vistas not yet totally wrecked, but subtly tainted by thoughtless, happy campers. A collector’s sensibility is central to this work, which often reads as a disinterested cataloguing of data. There’s something vaguely menacing in the flat, matter-of-fact way in which Fiskin presents her findings. (Newspace, 5241 Melrose Ave., to Jan. 7.)